Agrokor’s government appointed extraordinary commissioner appeared on Zoran Šprajc’s popular show on RTL television last night.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 31st of October, 2017, RTL Direkt‘s guest on Monday the 30th of October was Ante Ramljak, who stated that 70% of Agrokor’s debts need to be written off and that he believes that a deal with the ailing company’s numerous creditors will definitely be reached.
Journalists have already observed that in line with this plan, Agrokor is a fantastic company, and it isn’t clear what the problem was a few months ago when Lex Agrokor (law) was brought in and when you took over (Agrokor’s) administration. What kind of magic did you use to solve it?
“With a magic wand.”
Or with bookkeeping witchcraft?
“Everyone forgets how much the total amount of debt is. We still haven’t disclosed the total number of claims this company has yet, and it’s much larger than what operational indicators show as far as the operating profit of the company is concerned.”
Can you tell us how much the claim amount is?
“We’re expecting to file a table of claims at the Commercial Court within the coming days. At this point, I can only say that the total amount of claims, both deductible and non-deductible, is about 58 billion kuna, that’s the full amount…
What is the real debt write-off? It seemed that it ought to have been 60-70 percent so that your profit would be in the ratio of 1:6 to the debt, in order to make the firm interesting to investors. Have I said enough by saying that it’s 70 percent?
“You didn’t say a lot. I think it’s within the framework of 60-70 percent, and we’ll talk to the banks in this [type of] framework.”
Suppliers don’t want to write off more than 15 percent, is that realistic?
“We have to understand that in this entire process, the intentions of creditors to certain groups of [other] creditors and their claims won’t be the same. You have a different class, type and nature of claim, in the settlement proposal, we’ll go with different types and different procedures.”
There is a huge amount of interest, what are the chances of you settling [things] with the creditors?
“100%. Absolutely”.
If there is no settlement and the company does go bankrupt, what would that mean?
“In order for the settlement to succeed, 66 percent must vote for that [particular] settlement. At this point, we’ve got a situation where the vast majority of claims are unsecured, and that in the case of bankruptcy, their return would be 0. So, it’s in their interest to come to a settlement.”
So the settlement will not be dictated by [just] the big creditors, but actually by all of them?
“Yes, no one (single) creditor can dictate the settlement,” stated Ramljak in an interview with RTL Direkt.
